King Cling

Julian Bell: Kings and Collectors, 5 April 2018

Charles I: King and Collector 
Royal Academy, London, until 15 April 2018Show More
Charles II: Art and Power 
Queen’s Gallery/London, until 13 May 2018Show More
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... just as he had schmoozed Buckingham. In London there were two men – the architect Inigo Jones and the collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – who could claim to be authorities when it came to art in Italy, but on the ground there they had to deal, as did Charles, with the piratical broker Daniel Nijs. Nijs pounced on the Gonzagas of Mantua when ...

Lost Names

Andrea Brady: Lucille Clifton, 22 April 2021

how to carry water: Selected Poems 
by Lucille Clifton, edited by Aracelis Girmay.
BOA, 256 pp., £19.99, September 2020, 978 1 950774 14 2
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... won a scholarship to Howard University. She took Sterling A. Brown’s writing class and acted in James Baldwin’s play The Amen Corner. She became friends with Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Roberta Flack and Toni Morrison, who later encouraged her to write her memoirs using dictation to capture her family’s ...

Marquess Untrussed

Malcolm Gaskill: The Siege of Basing House, 30 March 2023

The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story 
by Jessie Childs.
Vintage, 318 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 78470 209 0
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... the botanist Thomas Johnson, the engraver William Faithorne and the elderly architect Inigo Jones. There was a wedding. Spies came and went. Deserters were caught and hanged. A plot to betray the house was uncovered. Then, early in 1644, the massing of Royalist forces around Winchester suggested a showdown was imminent. In March, Royalist hopes of ...

Impersonality

Barbara Everett, 10 November 1988

A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers 
by Hugh Kenner.
Barrie and Jenkins, 290 pp., £16.95, September 1988, 0 7126 2197 0
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... for Who’s Who) in positions of power in publishing-houses; our true literary talents – David Jones, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill – not forming a group, as they should, and in any case not read; and the food on British railways simply terrible (page 238: ‘Have you travelled on a British Railway? Gagged on its unthinkable ...

Taking the Blame

Jean McNicol: Jennie Lee, 7 May 1998

Jennie Lee: A Life 
by Patricia Hollis.
Oxford, 459 pp., £25, November 1997, 0 19 821580 0
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... watched and visitors to Lee’s dying father were cast as Bevanite conspirators) and told Mervyn Jones, who worked for Tribune: ‘Nye is 60. He can’t go on resigning and walking out and isolating himself with his little band of faithful. He can’t go on like that, he can’t.’ CND, which Lee thought ‘a hysterical middle-class lobby’, now dominated ...

Beyond the Cringe

John Barrell: British Art, 2 June 2016

Art in Britain 1660-1815 
by David Solkin.
Yale, 367 pp., £55, October 2015, 978 0 300 21556 4
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... struck by Waterhouse’s concern with the pedigrees of the painters he discussed, men like Thomas Jones, Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... the absence of climate sceptics in high places; and the Cambridge associate professor of divinity James Orr, who has hosted both Jordan Peterson and the notorious peddler of race science Charles Murray at events for Trinity Forum Europe, a conservative Christian charity.These men, together with other right-wing academics, reportedly began meeting in Cambridge ...
... rewarded by John with lands. Under Henry III he continued to prosper and became a baron. His son James (c.1220-77) was a royalist too in the Barons’ Wars and became Justiciar of Ireland in 1270. Two of his sons had descendants, the elder was the ancestor of the baronial family of Audeley of Heleigh Castle, Staffordshire and Red Castle, Salop which died out ...

Field of Bones

Charles Nicholl: The last journey of Thomas Coryate, the English fakir and legstretcher, 2 September 1999

... of self-fashioning, he is an essentially Jacobean product. Sometime after the accession of King James in 1603, he gained entry to the court of the precocious young Prince of Wales. According to Bishop Fuller, ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his servant. Sweetmeats and Coryate made up the last course on all court entertainments.’ In ...

Why are you still here?

James Meek: Who owns Grimsby?, 23 April 2015

... of the candidates who wasn’t born and raised in the town. Even the Conservative candidate, Marc Jones, was born to a staunch Labour family in East Marsh. Ayling is from South London, and only moved to rural Lincolnshire, south of Grimsby, in the 2000s (she did have a spell in Hull early in her career, marketing cod liver oil).She has also had to fend off ...

What’s so good about Reid?

Galen Strawson, 22 February 1990

Thomas Reid’s ‘Inquiry’: The Geometry of Visibles and the Case for Realism 
by Norman Daniels.
Stanford, 160 pp., £25, May 1989, 0 8047 1504 1
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Common Sense 
by Lynd Forguson.
Routledge, 193 pp., £30, November 1989, 0 415 02302 5
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Thomas Reid and the ‘Way of Ideas’ 
by Roger Gallie.
Reidel, 287 pp., £42, July 1989, 0 7923 0390 3
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Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by Peter Jones.
John Donald, 230 pp., £20, October 1989, 0 85976 225 4
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Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by M.A. Stewart.
Oxford, 328 pp., £37.50, January 1990, 0 19 824967 5
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Thomas Reid 
by Keith Lehrer.
Routledge, 311 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 415 03886 3
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... there is a sense in which Reid merely rotates Hume through 90 degrees: a fact noted by Sir James Mackintosh in 1812, when he remarked to Thomas Brown that on the question of the existence of the external world Reid and Hume ‘differed more in words that in opinion’. ‘Yes,’ answered Brown. ‘Reid bawled out, We must believe an outward world; but ...

Votes for Women, Chastity for Men

Brian Harrison, 21 January 1988

Troublesome People: Enemies of War, 1916-1986 
by Caroline Moorehead.
Hamish Hamilton, 344 pp., £14.95, April 1987, 0 241 12105 1
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Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 
by Susan Kingsley Kent.
Princeton, 295 pp., £22, June 1987, 0 691 05497 5
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Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860-1914 
by Pat Jalland.
Oxford, 366 pp., £19.50, November 1986, 0 19 822668 3
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An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the Webbs. A Study in British Social Policy, 1890-1929 
by A.M. McBriar.
Oxford, 407 pp., £35, July 1987, 0 19 820111 7
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... few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or Whitehall. Since 1979 Thatcherite ...

What about the aeroplanes?

Gillian Beer, 23 April 1987

The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 1 1904-1912 
edited by Andrew McNeillie.
Hogarth, 411 pp., £20, November 1986, 0 7012 0666 7
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The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels 
by Lucio Ruotolo.
Stanford, 262 pp., $29.50, November 1986, 0 8047 1342 1
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Virginia Woolf and the Real World 
by Alex Zwerdling.
California, 370 pp., £24.95, October 1986, 0 520 05684 1
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... defunct). To the Lighthouse opens with the picture of a refrigerator which the six-year-old James is cutting out ‘from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores’ (also now gone). His mother’s half-promise of an expedition to the lighthouse ‘endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed ...

Who is Laura?

Susannah Clapp, 3 December 1981

Olivia 
by Olivia.
Hogarth, 109 pp., £4.50, April 1981, 0 7012 0177 0
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... extended to her way with words: Dorothy Strachey remembers a romance-shrivelling reading of Tom Jones and a lot of good talk which left the children edgy and bored. In recalling the infrequent interventions of her father, who ‘would let fall from time to time a grim and gnomic apophthegm, which we treasured as a household word’, she mirrors one of the ...

White Lie Number Ten

Nicholas Jose: Australia’s aboriginal sovereignty, 19 February 1998

Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ Society 
edited by Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris.
Aboriginal Studies Press, 295 pp., AUS $29.95, March 1998, 0 85575 294 7
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Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation 
by Henry Reynolds.
Allen and Unwin, 221 pp., AUS $17.95, July 1996, 1 86373 969 6
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... with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the conclusion that ‘convicts and their descendants were corrupting, degrading and tormenting ...